John Cage once noted, with some disapproval, that no sooner was the theremin invented than people began trying to replicate 17th century chamber music with it. The Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose debut album Englabörn has been reissued without alteration by 4AD, is well-acquainted with the urge to map classical music traditions onto untraditional technologies: See, for instance, his album IBM 1401 - A User's Manual, where Jóhannsson crafted a pageant with all the mystery and bluster of a Sibelius symphony from a collection of archaric computer hymns. But in fact, he probably would have escaped Cage's censure-- neither a reactionary conservationist nor a baby-and-bathwater-chucking iconoclast, Jóhannsson avails himself of tools both conventional and emergent to accentuate, not obscure, his agility as a traditional composer.
When Jóhannsson recorded Englabörn, a score for a play of the same name by Hávar Sigurjónsson (the title means "angels") featuring a string quartet, piano, glockenspiel, percussion, and organ, IBM 1401 was still ahead of him, and the computer was still one color in his compositional palette, not the palette itself. The computerized embellishments on Englabörn are sparse: On "Odi et Amo" (roughly translated, "I love and hate"), a digitized voice sings Latin lines from Catullus in operatically aching strains, reclining on a bed of lambent strings. And on "Karen B´yr Til Engil", clipped mechanical blips rise up in delicate counterpoint to a hauntingly bare glockenspiel melody. The bulk of the album is purely acoustic, albeit with some subtle atmospheric enhancement that gives the strings a little extra quiver, the pianos more simmer, the organs a deeper breath.
Favoring neither classical music's expansive movements nor post-rock's bleary crescendos, Englabörn's short set pieces-- repetetive, minimal, emotionally charged, and deeply imagistic-- mark it particularly as a work of augmentation, a work that exists to complement another. Its reprises lend it internal continuity: The vocal melody from "Odi et Amo" reappears on "Krókódíll", transcribed for legato piano, and again on "Odi et Amo - Bis", couched somewhere between digital voice and bassoon. This fugal theme asserts a tone-- elegiac reverie-- if not an actual narrative, and shores up the album against undue contingency. In other words, no knowledge of Icelandic theater is necessary to reap the full measure of enjoyment from Englabörn, although its contrapuntal nature still resounds in its very structure. It's a work that exists in two separate dimensions.
Jóhannsson has said that the play for which he composed this music was quite violent, so his beatific score bears few direct correlaries to the action. Instead, it evokes a variety of dramatic conventions, archetypal ones, with deep humanism and touches of magical realism. Each piece strikes a little scene, spinning by like a zoetrope: The child standing at the edge of the dark forest, perhaps ("Jói & Karen", where apprehensive piano tentatively spans the distances between mystical surges of strings); the bitterly parting lovers (the title track, with its romantically swelling strings erupting in anxious trills) and their reunion under less-than-auspicious circumstances (the decomposing music-box minuet "Bað"); the witches' midnight dance (the tripping percussion and gyring melody of "Sálfræðingur"); boats on the snowy quay (the rolling swells and icicle drips of "...Eins Og Venjulegt Fólk"); et cetera. Of course, you'll be free to discover your own dramatic composition for Jóhannsson's work: For starters, just look around. Music in theater has the capacity to reveal the sublime in the mundane, and the best thing about Englabörn, a consummate walkabout album, is its capacity to do the same thing in real life.
